Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)

On Unity of Marxist-Leninists

Letter to Central Committee of CPC(M-L)

September 11, 1973

Central Committee,
Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)

Dear Comrades:

I wish at this time to come forward to support the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), to serve the Party and the working class in an organised, disciplined manner in order to make a contribution toward proletarian revolution in Canada.

Today; the military fascists of Chile have drowned in blood the illusions criminally put forward by social democrats and revisionists that revolution can be “peaceful”, that the working class can achieve “socialism” through bourgeois parliaments, that the state, which consists essentially of armed men and prisons, is “neutral” and above classes.

Let this terrible example serve all revolutionary minded workers, youth and students, intellectuals and progressive small producers, men and women, Native Indian, Metis and Inuit peoples, Quebecois, immigrant national minorities ’ all oppressed masses in Canada. What we need is a revolutionary party, a party guided by the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, a party united and disciplined behind a correct political line. Such a party exists: the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Let all revolutionaries learn from the tragic lesson of Chile and together make a contribution to proletarian revolution in Canada.

Because of my own history as a son of a communist proletarian, a member of the revisionist, so-called “Communist Party” since 1 was 17 years old, and a member of its Central Committee from May 1966 until December 1968, I make a special appeal to all those revolutionary minded former members and supporters of the Revisionist Party who quit the revisionists over their fundamental difference with revisionist ideology and practice, especially the practice of Soviet social-imperialism, to break completely with revisionism and come forward in unity with the Marxist-Leninists in Canada.

Even those who remain supporters of the revisionist leadership of Kashtan, Morgan and company can make a contribution to revolution in Canada by splitting with revisionism and making serious investigation of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.

I appeal also to the many students and youth of the 1960’s who I’ve shared various mass struggles with to break with the remnants of New Leftism, communalism, and so-called “libertarian life styles”, and to come forward to make a serious, protracted contribution to revolution in Canada. If anything, we have learned that the monopoly capitalist class can through its control of culture and the superstructure of society throw up countless diversions and dead ends for revolutionary minded youth to prevent them from making an actual contribution to proletarian revolution. Now is the time to throw overboard the so-called “youth culture”, OFY, LIP, LEAP, lackey grants, the garbage of the dying, decadent monopoly capitalist class, and to unite with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist).

I also specifically ask the revolutionary minded intellectuals I have worked with as a college teacher and organiser of many readings for Canadian writers to struggle for revolutionary clarity in their work, whether it be in their teaching or their writing. We know that class struggle is especially sharp in the sphere of intellectual life, and that every idea is stamped with a social class in its origin and in the class interest it serves. We must resolutely break from the liberal bourgeois line that everything is a matter of interpretation, discussion and definition, that literature and art stand above social classes and class struggle. Now is the time to defend resolutely the scientific world view of the proletariat, dialectical and historical materialism. Let us firmly oppose the obscurantists in the classrooms, the opportunists and careerists who peddle ideas of national nihilism,despair and self-cultivation in their writing. Let us unite together with the revolutionary proletariat in their party, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Revolutionary unity between the workers and intellectuals together with other oppressed masses is the only guarantee of national liberation, proletarian revolution, of a true national renaissance in all fields of culture and science.

Even those cultural-scientific workers who have strong disagreements with Marxism-Leninism can make a definite contribution to democracy by resolutely supporting the inalienable right of revolutionaries to sell their magazines and newspapers (PCDN, Mass Line, etc.) on the streets, in schools and at places of work.

Finally I urge the many revolutionary minded trade unionists I have worked with during the past years to break decisively from the economist and “trade union caucus” line. The most urgent task facing revolutionary workers is the long, torturous struggle of integrating communist ideas into the very midst of the Canadian labour movement. Secondly, we must intensify the fight for working class unity on the basis of fighting each and every worker’s just demand to the very end, to victory.

Hence the necessity to investigate the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) seriously, read People’s Canada Daily News regularly and discuss the line of the Party frankly and above-board. Revolutionary workers must oppose all manifestations of anti-communiSm and racism (the main ideological weaponry of fascism), and carry on protracted ideological struggle against reformist and revisionist lines, the main social prop of U.S. and Soviet social-imperialism inside the workers’ movement. Putchism against this or that bad element in this or that local will only perpetuate economism, social democracy and revisionism.

Only by constanly fighting on principle over a protracted period of time with the correct Marxist-Leninist line will workers be able to seize back their trade unions from the U.S. imperialist, social democratic and Soviet social-imperialist labour aristocracy, and turn them into truly democratic,, militant defence organisations of the Canadian working class.

As Marxist- Leninist workers begin to set an example as tireless militants whose only interst is to serve the working class as a whole in its historic task of overthrowing the monopoly capitalist state, and creating a proletarian state, first a trickle/then a stream and fimally a revolutionary torrent of workers will come up against those who preach capitulation to capitalist law and order, against those who practice class collaboration and spread illusions about the “peaceful” or “parliamentary” road to socialism.

Marxist-Leninist militants in the trade unions of Canada, let us leave the economists, careerists, wheelers and dealers and opportunists behind. Let us unite with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), the Party of the Canadian proletariat.

In conclusion, I wish to recall some historical facts about my experience with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). I have known Comrade Hardial Bains since 1963 when we were students together at the University of British Columbia. Even though I was the leader of the Revisionist Party Club at U.B.C. (1961-1967), I acknowledged Bains’ outstanding leadership in organising the Internationalists. The Internationalists became the centre for the development of anti-imperialist ideas, for serious discussion among students and faculty. Bains was also the first one on campus to promote systematically the writings of Mao Tsetung and to combat revisionism. I remember many protracted ideological battles Bains had with me. I promoted the revisionist idea that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the world’s leading revolutionary force because it headed the first socialist state, and had the most developed economy. Bains argued that political line determined everything, that the Communist Party of China, led by Mao Tsetung, was politically correct. Therefore the Chinese Communist Party was the leading force in the struggle of the world’s oppressed-masses, for independence, liberation and revolution. Bains argued, in 1963 that, Mao Tsetung Thought was the theoretical expression of Marxism-Leninism in our era.

Comrade Bains also participated directly in the mass struggles of the student and youth movement during the upsurge of the 1960’s. He always sought unity of progressive forces on a principled basis, and always struggled against various reactionary ideas and social practice which sprang up in the mass movement. I remember clearly his struggle at Student Union for Peace Action conferences against New Left ideas. I remember how he led the campaign to elect various progressive student union officers, including myself as Alma Mater Society vice-president in 1966. Yet while he supported my election campaign he struggled against my revisionist ideas and social practice, especially my opportunism in using the mass movement to promote myself. Bains’ revolutionary line seeking unity for revolution while simultaneously combatting incorrect ideas and bad social practice is the only correct, historically proven method of building a revolutionary party.

The results of this method are quite clear. After ten years of work, the Internationalists have grown from an anti-imperialist discussion group at U.B.C. into the Marxist-Leninist Party with branches in over 18 cities all across Canada. CPC(M-L) has a daily working class paper, a strong central leadership, and a united, determined membership. Armed with the correct line, where there were only one or two, today there are many, tomorrow there will be thousands, and within a relatively short historical period of time there will be proletarian revolution in Canada. This is a law of history.

Let me recall a few more historical facts. In 1965, when the revisionist Young Communist League decided to organise a militant demonstration against then Prime Minister Lester Pearson for his support of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, Comrade Bains actively supported the demonstration. At the same time he vigorously denounced the revisionist line of simply protesting against “violence”, “war”, “bombing”. Comrade Bains, despite the usual revisionist tactic of trying to stifle political discussion of line, argued at a mass meeting of the demonstrators, that we should support the political programme of the National Liberation Front, popularise it with the Canadian masses, and resolutely defend the right of all oppressed peoples to take up guns against their oppressors. Further, he related the importance of the Vietnamese example of armed struggle combined with correct political work among the masses to the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal, anti-capitalist struggles of the Indian people. He predicted that, following the correct political line of Mao Tsetung, the Indian masses would soon be rising up in armed struggle. Bains also said that the best contribution to the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation was to work out a correct line for revolution here in Canada, and to organise around that line.

Natuarally we revisionists thought this man was “mad”. After all, India was to be the model for “peaceful transition”, of the “parliamentary road to socialism”. We accused Bains of “leftism” in promoting the National Liberation Front’s programme. Canadian workers were too “backward” to understand, we said. Despite the fact that Bains’ correct line was over-ruled by a bureaucratic method, he continued to support the militant sentiment of the demonstrators who were arrested for sitting down in front of Mr. Pearson as he headed the P.N.E. parade. That was August 1965.

My own experience in Toronto from 1967-68 as editor of the revisionist magazine,Scan, and my participation in the leadership of the Central Youth Commission of the Revisionist Party, exposed to me how hopelessly bankrupt and degenerate the Revisionist Party had become. Instead of struggle for correctness and clarity of political line, they obscured and stopped development of ideas. Anarchy of line combined with bureaucratic commandism of office – this was the actuality of revisionist “leadership”. I discovered that more revisionist Canadian Tribunes were sold in the Soviet Union than in Canada. Thus Soviet workers subsidised a propaganda organ for Soviet social-imperialism in Canada. The revisionist “leadership” liquidated Marxist-Leninist education programmes in Canada, and promoted instead one/two year tours to Moscow to study revisionism, often seized upon by opportunist elements to holiday at the expense of Soviet workers. Various revisionist “leaders” made one junket after another to the Soviet Union and the vassal states of eastern Europe, always of course to promote “internationalism”, “peace”, “mutual help”.

It was precisely at one such junket in Eastern Europe that the whole fiasco of the so-called “Hemispheric Conference” to support Vietnam was hatched. If any event revealed the political incompetence, and outright counter-revolutionary nature of revisionism, it was this conference in Montreal, December, 1968. instead of promoting unity to oppose U.S. imperialism, it promoted disunity and comfort to the bourgeois media. From beginning to end, the fiasco was the handiwork of William Kashtan and his flunkies in the revisionist parties.

By the time of the Hemispheric Conference, however, I had already conspired with a number of leading revisionists in Vancouver to break with the Revisionist Party. All the internal contradictions of the Revisionist Party, its line and method of work, wer brought to a head for us by the Party’s response to the Soviet social-imperialist invasion of Czechoslovakia. Although the Central Committee had instructed Mr. Kashtan to investigate the Czechoslovakian situation first hand in the summer of 1968, his poor sense of geography landed him in Moscow instead of Prague. Such faithful loyality Mr Kashtan, such a fine internationalist! He then sounded the alarm of “anti-Sovietism” (ie. anti-Soviet social-imperialism, for what else could the invasion be called but socialism in words, imperialism in deeds!) and in typically fascist style “purged” the Party and leadership of all those who didn’t support the invasion.

Although I quit before I was purged, and although I liberated Scan magazine from their control for a while, I unfortunately could not publish an anti-revisionist Scan because i had not yet understood Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought as the only alternative to revisionism.

Thus my encounter with neo-revisionism. Since 19681 wanted to contribute to proletarian revolution but could see no way forward. I flirted with Roger Garaudy’s revisionist ideas, and took the line that the time was not ripe for a revolutionary party. In this frame of mind I taught college for a year in Prince George, was fired, and then worked on tug-boats for a year in Vancouver, also serving as a delegate to the Vancouver Labour Council.

While teaching in Edmonton I met two men, Corporal Fox, RCMP Internal Security Agent, and Jack Scott, neo-revisionist. I met both men by coincidence on the same day, sometime in February 1972. Corporal Fox visited me in the morning to inquire whether if I were granted Canadian citizenship (I had been rejected without reason in 1964 and 1966 even though I’d lived in Canada since I was four years old) would I spy for Soviet social-imperialism! Fox then asked me various questions about people in the New Left which I refused to answer. He also to my surprise made a strong slanderous attack against CPC(M-L) and Partisan Party. He singled out Comrade Bains as a “self-appointed guru of the left” and made similar slanders. At this time I did not agree with the line of CPC(M-L) but even so was surprised by the sharpness of this police agent’s attack.

Later the same day, Jack Scott, who was making a speech at some “anti-poverty” conference, stayed at my house. He too attacked CPC(M-L), slandered Hardial Bains as a “guru of the left” and so forth. Scott put forward the line that now is not the time to build a Marxist-Leninist Party, and that one should adopt a “critical attitude” towards Comrade Mao and the Chinese Party.

Whereas Corporal Fox could have no ideological influence on me as he was an open agent of the monopoly capitalist state, Scott, even though he peddled the same line as Fox, did have an effect. For over one year the influence of Jack Scott’s neo-revisionist ideas kept me away from the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Both Fox and Scott have some explanations to make for their counter-revolutionary activities to the Canadian working class.

These facts of my experience show that ideas don’t fall from the sky. My decision to support CPC(M-L) comes from my desire to make a contribution to proletarian revolution, and my specific social practice which has shown me that the social practice of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) is the way forward. I know many more revolutionary minded people will also come forward to unite with the CPC(M-L). The trend for unity of all Marxist-Leninists cannot be stopped by either police repression, or social democratic, revisionist and neo-revisionist ideas. Let us join together in unity with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) to make a contribution to proletarian revolution in Canada.